Ants as Household Pets (Sep, 1931)

Ants as Household Pets

ANT houses for children to build and watch at school and at home, as many schools and homes now keep bowls of goldfish or other kinds of aquaria, have been introduced at Hanover, New Hampshire, by Prof. Frank E. Austin of Dartmouth College. An ant house consists of two sheets of glass held in a wooden frame, like the two panes of a double window. The space between the glass sheets is filled with layers of sand or soil like that in which the ants ordinarily live. An ant colony is started in this glass house by introducing either a part of an existing colony or a fertilized ant queen who can start a new one. The ants proceed to build typical underground tunnels and chambers in which the life of the insects goes on just as in a normal ant-hill, apparently indifferent to the exposure of insect secrets to human gaze.